RECENT WRITINGS

Fantastic materials – and where to find them

Scientists are developing super materials from some most unlikely beginnings. Could spider silk ever be a useful (human) building material? How about transparent wood, ‘printed’ sandstone, or a bio-plastic derived from crabs hells? These and plenty more seemingly fantastical notions will be explored from February at The Building Centre’s SuperMaterial exhibition. (…) Architect Dirk Hebel has developed a new material made from bamboo fibres and resin that could be used to replace steel rebar.

The first research programme under the Singapore-ETH Centre, the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL), combines science and design to develop new knowledge,
technologies, and approaches for a sustainable urban future with an Asian perspective. In addressing the challenges of rapid urbanisation, the FCL research team has developed innovative urban solutions in areas including urban design, mobility and transportation, low-energy cooling systems, and sustainable construction materials, among others.

Bamboo is a rapid growing, affordable and available natural resource in many developing countries. It is potentially superior to timber and to construction steel in terms of its weight to strength ratio. A new technology has been developed in this research to preserve the mechanical properties of bamboo and to enhance physical characteristics through composite action for application in structural concrete. The goal of present work is to investigate the bonding properties of a newly developed bamboo-composite reinforcement in concrete through pull-out testing. Various coatings are applied to determine bonding behavior between concrete and newly developed bamboo-composite reinforcement. The results of this study demonstrate that bamboo-composite reinforcement without coating develops adequate bonding with the concrete matrix. However an epoxy based coating with sand particles could provide extra protection without loss of bond strength.

Waste Vault ETH Zürich Pavilion

For the IDEAS CITY Festival in New York City in May 2015, a team of ETH Zürich’s Professorships Dirk E. Hebel and Philippe Block constructed a 90m2 pavilion made from recycled beverage packaging, aiming to show the immense potential of waste for the construction sector. The article includes an interview with project architect Felix Heisel.

Essay Series: Engineering bamboo – a green alternative under basic research Part 3, Professorship of Architecture and Construction Dirk E. Hebel: The Advanced Fibre Composite Laboratory in Singapore investigates new methods and procedures to produce a high-strength building material out of natural bamboo fibres. If successful, the research could provide a starting point for the introduction of new and adapted technologies that take a widespread natural resource as their basic premise and give reason for people who live in the tropical belt to foster one of the most common plants in the sub-tropical climate zone.

Essay Series: Engineering bamboo – a green technical alternative Part 2, Professorship of Architecture and Construction Dirk E. Hebel: At the Advanced Fibre Composite Laboratory in Singapore, a new mechanical processing for raw bamboo has been developed, which leads to a fibrous material with physical features that are mainly defined by the bamboo species. This material is used as a natural fibre source for the production of a high-tensile fibre reinforced composite material aiming for the construction industry. Thereby, controlling the parameters of the underlying hot press fabrication process turned out to be crucial for a systematic tuning of the tensile capacities of the resulting composite materials.

Lessons of Informality

Never before have cities been so important. Today, cities are home to the majority of the world’s population, accommodate most of global production, and are the goal of millions of migrants around the world. Yet, increasingly, our cities are growing informally, planned and built by non-professionals. Informality resembles an evolutionary process more than a simple absence of rules. In itself, informality is neither illegal, nor dysfunctional, nor indicative of poverty; in fact, its actors, skills and capital are probably our best chance to solve the world’s growing housing crisis.

The book includes a DVD of _Spaces, a series of six documentaries on informality in Addis Ababa.

Cities of Change Addis Ababa: second and revised edition

Aiming to identify sustainable strategies―rather than upholding an a priori vision of an ideal city―the publication acknowledges the heterogeneous conditions of urban territories. This revised edition highlights questions of method and procedure that can be transferred to other ‘cities of change’, and covers recent developments, such as the increasing influence of China in African countries or the chances of high-density, low-rise developments.

For the IDEAS CITY Festival in New York at the end of May, ETH Zurich constructed a 90 m2 pavilion made from recycled beverage packaging. The project, led by ETH Zurich`s Assistant Professor Dirk E. Hebel and Professor Philippe Block, aims to show the immense potential of waste for the construction sector.

Essay Series: Engineering bamboo – a green economic alternative Part 1 Professorship of Architecture and Construction Dirk E. Hebel: Steel-reinforced concrete is the most common building material in the world, and developing countries use close to 90 per cent of the cement and 80 per cent of the steel consumed by the global construction sector. However, very few developing countries have the ability or resources to produce their own steel or cement, forcing them into an exploitative import-relationship with the developed world. Out of 54 African nations, for instance, only two are producing steel. The other 52 countries all compete in the global marketplace for this ever-more-expensive, seemingly irreplaceable material.

Every day and perhaps even every hour, there’s a scientist somewhere in the world making the next scientific breakthrough. Indeed, scientific development cannot take place in a vacuum; rather it thrives in an environment that offers inspiration and the necessary framework. One such place is ETH Zurich; it has flourished in this role over the course of its more than 150-year history. It is not presumptuous to claim that Peter Baccini in the 1980s and 90s as Head of Research at Eawag in Dübendorf (Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology),developed the scientific fundamentals, tools and concepts of a radical paradigm shift in the waste management strategy of Switzerland that came to regard waste as a recurring resource and no longer solely as an undesirable substance to be disposed of. The pioneering innovation of his work was a new Swiss waste management model in 1986, which was not concerned with technical proposals for solutions to existing problems per se, but rather focused on formulating visionary social objectives of how waste can become an important part of the material management in our habitat.

SUDU―the Sustainable Urban Dwelling Unit―is a full-scale prototype for an affordable, two-story house built with local materials and traditional building techniques in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. Developed in a collaborative endeavor between the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction and City Development and ETH Zurich, SUDU ties in with the rich tradition of loam construction while at the same time taking a fresh look at how to adapt this tradition to contemporary needs. Recapitulating SUDU’s idiosyncratic construction process in two lavishly illustrated volumes, this publication details the building techniques employed, such as rammed earth, mud bricks, and timbrel vaulting. The first volume additionally explores the history of Ethiopian architecture, the postcolonial nature of its current construction industry, and the challenges of the country’s rapid urbanization. The second volume, a manual with more than 600 detailed drawings and instructions, demonstrates how to build a house, step-by-step, with the most readily available building material―earth.

Building from Waste

Waste is a result of any human action and interaction, bringing raw natural materials – understood so far as our sole form of resources – from one stage of being into another, by applying various forms of skills and energy. In this sense, waste was seen for centuries as something specific which neither belonged to the family of natural resources nor to the one of finished products. Waste was a by-product, unable to be categorized in our dialectic understanding of raw vs. configured. But waste could also be understood as an integral part of what we define as a resource. We would thereby acknowledge its capacity to figure as the required substance or matter from which to construct or configure a new product. And at the same time, the product could be seen as the supply source for other artifacts, after its first life span. This metabolic thinking understands our built environment as an interim stage of material storage, or to say it in the words of Mitchell Joachim: “The future city makes no distinction between waste and supply.”

Constructing Alternatives

The FCL Magazine Special Issue gives an overview of the research by the Assistant Professorship of Architecture and Construction Dirk E. Hebel between 2012 and 2015 in Singapore at the Future Cities laboratory and the ETH Zürich. So far underused or forgotten substances such as bamboo, sand substitutes, and waste, as well as questions on architectural and urban design strategies putting these in the center of investigation illustrate the overall aim to activate a alternative building methods and construction technologies and with it an informed understanding of “Constructing Alternatives”.

Bamboo Fibre Is Stronger and Cheaper than Steel, Says Dirk Hebel

Bamboo could “revolutionise the building industry” and replace steel as the dominant reinforcing material, according to a professor who is working on new applications for the grass. Speaking at WAF in Singapore today, Dirk Hebel said that bamboo fibre could be used as a more sustainable and far cheaper alternative to steel on construction sites.

Vermeiden, Vermindern, Verwerten

The reduction of waste starts with design and consumption. The examples in this issue show manifold and pragmatic approaches on how to avoid a throw-away mentality in architecture. The book and exhibition ‘Building from Waste’ sets the theoretical background for the discussed projects.

Three ways we build the cities of the future from waste

June 29, 2015

Gould, Hannah (2015). Three Ways We Will Build the Cities of the Future from Waste, The Guardian (online).

As the global population grows, it is also becoming more city-based with 70% expected to live in urban areas by 2050. It is a trend that has not escaped sci-fi in Hollywood, which reimagines the city of the future again and again, but there are those trying to bring sustainable cities to life in reality. Truly sustainable cities of the future will not differentiate between waste and resource. Rather, they will understand waste as the starting point for something new.

5 ideas every city should steal from Singapore

June 16, 2015

Senthilingam, Meera (2015). 5 ideas every city should steal from Singapore, CNN.com

Singapore is small, hot and heavily populated but also among the most liveable and economically successful cities in the word. How have they done it?
Hebel’s team recently exhibited the possibilities of waste recycling during the 2015 New York City Ideas Festival. They built an arched canopy pavilion comprised of waterproof panels made from discarded beverage containers. “There are things surrounding us that can be used in a secondary life as a building structure.”

Architects and engineers from ETH Zurich university used waste material to create a vaulted pavilion for New York City’s Ideas Festival. The ETH Future Pavilion was designed to demonstrate how trash can be transformed into a viable building material. The temporary structure was constructed within a narrow park that stretches between two buildings in New York’s East Village.

Müll schafft Möglichkeiten

Based on their research at the ETH Zürich and the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, authors Prof. Dirk E. Hebel, Marta H. Wisniewska and Felix Heisel offer in their recent publication ‘Building from Waste’ a conceptual and practical view on the possibilities of construction with a so far untapped resource.

Action for Cities

The Future Cities: Research in Action exhibition by Future Cities Laboratory featured prominently on the ground floor of URA Centre from 23 January to 13 March 2015. Felicia Toh investigates its key research interests in cities.

Could bamboo replace steel reinforcement in developing countries?

Singapore’s Future Cities Laboratory is working to tap into the potential of bamboo as an alternative to steel for reinforced concrete applications in developing countries. Currently, steel-reinforced concrete is the most common building material in the world, and developing countries use close to 90 per cent of the cement and 80 per cent of the steel consumed by the global construction sector. However, few developing countries actually produce their own steel or cement and are thus forced into exploitative relationships with sellers in the developed world. read more

Philippe Jorisch is currently working as a teaching assistant at the chair of Architecture and Construction Dirk E. Hebel at the ETH Zurich. He practices architecture with the firm JOM Architects, which he co-founded together with Stefan Oeschger and Michael Metzger in 2013.

During studies he worked as an intern at Boesch and EM2N Architects and participated in exchange programs at the TU Delft in the Netherlands and the FAU São Paulo in Brazil. His academic experience involve teaching as a student assistant at the chair Prof. Marc Angélil in 2009, writing as an editor of trans magazine in 2011. Together with Forrest Meggers and Dario Pfammatter he was awarded the first prize for the Project „Boba Flat“ at the Student Poster Competition of the Holcim Forum for Sustainable Construction in Mexico City in 2010. For his diploma thesis about Zurich-West he received a travel grant to Brazil from the Erich Degen Stiftung in 2012. A year later he contributed to the tenth architecture biennale in São Paulo with the project SP2014.NET. He is fluent in German, English, French, Dutch and Portuguese.